Alongside the curves of the Colorado River, surrounded by flatlands and scrub, Tesla’s Gigafactory sprawls over 2,500 acres outside Austin, Texas. From the air it looks like a landing pad for aliens. Capital letters hundreds of feet tall spell out tesla in white across the roof, big enough to see from the window of a passing airplane. Opened in 2022, the factory itself hunkers down low. It’s not a campus, like the California headquarters of Google or Apple. The Gigafactory is a single, enormous building, a walled fortress as big as a cattle ranch.
For Elon Musk and his backers in the state capitol the Gigafactory is much more than a place to make cars. The complex’s enormous assembly floor, with its shiny red robots and twenty thousand employees, sends a Texas-sized message to entrepreneurs everywhere: the future won’t be built in California or New York. It will be built in the Bible Belt, by men—always men—with the willpower to tame the forces of technology, wrestle profit from the land, and create new industries out of whole cloth. It will rise up like the oil derricks of a hundred years before and give evidence of the limitless, God-given natural bounty of the region. It will make some men rich and when it does, it will provide evidence that the land still breeds heroes like Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, defenders of the Alamo.
You can see where this is going. In press releases and feature stories, Tesla’s Gigafactory is a translation device, turning decades and even centuries of Texas lore into elements of a new cultural formation, a Texan Ideology. Thirty years ago, when political theorist Richard Barbrook and artist Andy Cameron published their canonical essay “The Californian Ideology” in Mute, a British journal devoted to critiquing early internet culture, the computer industry of Silicon Valley was surrounded by the remnants of San Francisco’s 1960s counterculture. The collision of these worlds produced a new orthodoxy, they wrote, one that “promiscuously combines the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies.”
Today, the hippies have aged out of the computer industry entirely, the yuppies are retired, and high-tech entrepreneurs like Musk are leaving California for Texas. The world of digital technology has changed too. In the 1990s, everyone from modem makers to software developers was focused on building the global network. Connection was the order of the day. Today, the World Wide Web is in place, our computers are in our pockets, and the smart money bets on turning the data we generate into patterns that can be sold to the highest bidder. The global system of connection built out in the 1990s has turned the social world into a resource for the oldest form of capitalism, extraction.
For that kind of work Texas makes an ideal home. Built early on from the profits of cattle ranching and slave-picked cotton, propelled to national prominence by the oil booms of the early twentieth century, Texas has long been synonymous with turning natural and human resources into money. Its promoters have been expert, too, in turning cowboys and oilmen into emblems of American masculinity and celebrating a muscular Christianity. From its earliest days as part of Mexico, when the Mexican government required settlers to convert to Catholicism, extraction has been entwined with religion and racial politics. In the 1920s and 1930s, fundamentalist Christian radio echoed across the state. In 1953, Reverend Billy Graham staged a revival that filled the Cotton Bowl with seventy-five thousand Texans. Since the 1950s, Southern Baptists, whose conservatism has increased over the decades, have dominated the state’s religious scene. Today, they and right-wing members of other denominations help organize and fund the state’s politics.
Because conservative Christianity is so tightly woven into the state’s political culture, Musk and his fellow California exiles find themselves confronting a new ideological fusion, a blend of neoliberal economic policies and Christian-nationalist cultural ambition, rooted in the state’s long history of resource extraction and at ease with racism and misogyny. That fusion has lately found a home in the White House too, and it should make us wonder: Whatever happened to the Californian dream of benevolent interconnection at scale? What kinds of dreams are replacing it? And what does Texas have to do with the shift?
Back to the Future
When Barbook and Cameron described the Californian Ideology in the mid-1990s, social media didn’t exist. There were no platforms as we understand them today, no apps, no Google or DuckDuckGo. IBM had just released the first smart phone, the “Simon,” but it cost $1,099, had a one-hour battery life, and didn’t exactly take off. Silicon Valley was beginning to become the software development hub that it is today, but in the early 1990s the dominant companies in the Valley made pieces of the internet: semiconductors (Intel), network hardware (Cisco Systems), workstations (Sun Microsystems) and personal computers (Apple and Hewlett-Packard). All across the country, businesses were building out digital networks. By 1993, the federally sponsored backbone of the internet, NSFNET, linked more than two million computers, HTML code was widely available, and the World Wide Web was coming into view.
In Silicon Valley, while programmers and chip makers hammered away at the global network, a motley crew of journalists, hackers, and ad men began to describe what was happening as a countercultural revolution. In magazines like Wired, they argued that the new technologies were opening up what Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow famously called an “electronic frontier,” a world without bodies and far beyond politics, in which individuals would convene in a kind of harmony impossible to create in everyday life. The internet, they suggested, would finally do what LSD was supposed to have done in the 1960s: make it possible to see the connections between every living and nonliving thing and to build a utopia around the notion that, as hippies liked to say, “We Are All One.”
For marketers, the connection between the counterculture and computing was pure catnip. Sex, drugs and rock and roll were cool in a way that computers never had been. But as Barbrook and Cameron pointed out, the fusion of bohemian and technocratic idealism came with a peculiarly conservative politics. “In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich,” they wrote. To get there, they would have to embrace the free market and the internet as models of polity. Every person would have to become a node in a network, producing ideas and circulating them among others in a world that was always both social and commercial. When they did, wrote Barbrook and Cameron, many believed they would fulfill one of the dreams of Newt Gingrich’s New Right. Thanks to the internet, state and legal systems, with their cumbersome regulations and onerous politics, would “wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals and their software.”
This vision was especially appealing to the technologists of Silicon Valley, who delighted in imagining that they weren’t just drones building high-tech hives but rebels, going after The Man with every keystroke. The Californian Ideology served their companies well too. If computers were going to bring about utopia then everybody needed one. If California was the future, then stodgy old Washington, D.C., had to get those regulations out of the way. The Californian Ideology not only linked the expansion of the internet to a countercultural dream, it turned that dream into a tool with which to transform the whole world into a market for Silicon Valley’s devices.
CEOs like Musk who are moving their company headquarters from California to Texas are doing so in part to flee the inequality that their industries have produced.
It also reimagined the online world and the state of California as paradises for the white, male entrepreneur. Adherents of the Californian Ideology turned a blind eye to the conditions of everyday life in California and especially “racism, poverty, and environmental degradation,” wrote Barbrook and Cameron. They imagined cyberspace as an empty land, ready for colonization, just as those who had headed back to the land in the 1960s imagined America as a wilderness ripe for settlement. In California, former hippies and technologists could agree: one need only recognize that everything was connected and build systems that let others experience that connection. Questions of prejudice and inequality could be ignored along the way because in the end the new systems would make them disappear.
From San Francisco to Austin
Today, the hope that interlinked computers would create utopia seems exceedingly naive. For all Mark Zuckerberg’s talk about wanting to connect the world, Facebook remains an engine of political conflict, in the United States and overseas. The way Facebook makes its money marks an important shift from the 1990s too. Back then, no one was really sure how to profit from the new digital networks; they just knew there was money in there somewhere. By 2010 or so, social media and platform builders like Facebook had learned to concentrate our natural human sociability in online interactions on their proprietary platforms and turn it into a resource to be mined. Today companies from TikTok to Google harness our attention and get us to reveal the patterns of our desires, our social habits, our consumption. They’ve turned a system ostensibly devoted to the countercultural dream of unfettered, harmonious interaction into a system of surveillance and extraction.
That turn doesn’t fit so well with the Californian Ideology. Nor does California itself. CEOs like Musk who are moving their company headquarters from California to Texas are doing so in part to flee the inequality that their industries have produced. The concentration of high-end tech workers all along the San Francisco Peninsula has driven housing costs so high that ordinary mortals find themselves living in trailers or even the street. In San Francisco’s downtown Tenderloin district, the homeless sprawl on the sidewalks.
The CEOs don’t like the world they’ve helped create. In the fall of 2020, serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale decided to move his family and his company’s headquarters to Austin. As he told the readers of the Wall Street Journal in an op-ed explaining his decision, “Ill-conceived criminal-justice reforms and radical district attorneys are taking a toll on urban life. Three of my colleagues’ wives have been harassed and chased by derelicts in San Francisco’s streets, which are littered with needles and human waste. My wife is afraid to walk around the city with our young daughters. Police often don’t even respond to harassment and property crime, which has surged; San Francisco’s property-crime rate is now the nation’s highest.”
That actually wasn’t true. Memphis, Tennessee, had a higher per capita property crime rate that year according to the FBI, and while sources and methods vary, other studies have put Fairbanks, Alaska, and Alexandria, Louisiana, ahead of San Francisco too. Lonsdale’s account is fascinating though for the way it associates personal threats to the wives and daughters of men like him with state-level failures of law and regulation. Elsewhere in the article, he notes San Francisco City Hall’s failures to support businesses like his during the early days of Covid. To his way of thinking, the state was endangering his family and the business he built—the very things that he, as a Man Who Builds Things, had to protect. Lonsdale takes no responsibility for the impact his own industry has had on the region. On the contrary, he argues that it is “Bad policy [that] has made the state unlivable.”
If the California Ideology grew out of the collision of the computer industry and the counterculture, the Texan Ideology reflects a century-old fusion of the oil industry and millenarian Christianity.
Lonsdale’s case in the Journal mirrors a decade-long informal campaign by forces on the right to depict California as a “failed state.” Texas governors have been happy warriors in this fight. In 2015, when Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared California a bastion of “failed big government,” he was simply stepping into the shoes of his predecessor, Rick Perry, who had once funded radio ads in California calling on companies to move to Texas. In his ads Perry reminded listeners that Texas has no income tax. And across the board, much of the right wing’s attack on California has focused on economics. A 2022 study published by the conservative Hoover Institution, for instance, reported that 352 companies had moved their headquarters out of California between the start of 2018 and the end of 2021. Why? According to the authors and their CEO sources the answers were clear: “high tax rates, punitive regulations, high labor costs, high utility and energy costs, and high living costs, particularly the cost of housing affordability.”
But among migrating Silicon Valley leaders, there is a second story as well. This story links California’s ostensible failure to create a regulatory environment that would allow entrepreneurs to work their market magic to the state’s failure to contain the appetites of ordinary people. Tales of venture capitalists stumbling over drug addicts in the street are common, as are accounts of failing schools and of teachers and firemen unable to buy homes. But it’s the state that takes the blame, not industry. Rather than use income from taxes to rebuild city resources, say the CEOs, California leaders have doubled down on protecting woke orthodoxies. San Francisco has been captured by the “far left,” said Joe Lonsdale. And Elon Musk has harped on the evils of a “woke mind virus,” blaming it for everything from his daughter’s gender transition to California’s struggles to contain wildfires.
It’s here that the very real challenges of living and working in Northern California meet the material interests of venture capitalists and the culture war tactics of the Republican right. In a 2020 essay entitled “Libertarianism is Dysfunctional, but Liberty is Great,” Lonsdale gave readers a glimpse of the emerging confluence. The libertarianism that defined Silicon Valley for decades had become a “purely performative sort of politics,” he explained. Since the New Deal, the government’s role in everyday life (and presumably the regulation of industry) had increased; libertarianism was no longer strong enough to stop it. Instead, wrote Lonsdale, Americans should choose “liberty.” By liberty, Lonsdale meant that Americans should choose a kind of government modeled on the for-profit corporation. “If we want to fix the most broken areas of our society, such as criminal justice, education, and healthcare, we must embrace policy solutions that mirror the competition of ideas that defines a free society,” he argued. That meant making public policy like CEOs make business plans: set a goal, define metrics for success, and hold people accountable for meeting the metrics.
This might sound eminently sensible on its face, and yet, in Lonsdale’s essay, it quickly leads to a world in which wealth becomes the measure of social good. Imagine what would happen, he writes, if universities were evaluated not on graduation rates, but on “the basis of the real earnings of their graduates”! At the end of the day, Lonsdale’s vision of liberty begins to sound a lot like Reagan-era neoliberalism. “Liberty forces us to take personal responsibility for our decisions in the knowledge that each of us is the author of our own life,” he explains. If that means leaving some people behind, so be it. In Lonsdale’s view, liberty frees up our ostensibly most gifted citizens to compete in marketplaces of goods and ideas. “If entrepreneurs are free to fail or to succeed in the marketplace of ideas, and entitled to the fruits of their labor,” he writes, “talented individuals will devise beautiful new ways to enrich the lives of others.”
And of course, to enrich themselves.
Going Big in Texas
In MaddAddam, her sci-fi chronicle of a world blown apart by misguided bioengineers, high-tech corporations, and ecological collapse, Margaret Atwood describes the rise of a new sect, the Petrobaptists, who worship in “a megachurch, all glass slabbery and pretend oak pews and faux granite, out on the rolling plains”: the Church of PetrOleum. There a preacher called the Rev holds forth:
“My friends, as we all know, oleum is the Latin word for oil. And indeed, oil is holy throughout the Bible! What else is used for the anointing of priests and prophets and kings? Oil! It’s the sign of special election, the consecrated chrism! . . . The Holy Oleum must not be hidden under a bushel—in other words, left underneath the rocks—for to do so is to flout the Word! Lift up your voices in song, and let the Oleum gush forth in ever stronger and all-blessed streams!”
The Rev would have felt right at home in Texas. If the California Ideology grew out of the collision of the computer industry and the counterculture, the Texan Ideology reflects a century-old fusion of the oil industry and millenarian Christianity. Texas is a Western state, but it is also the biggest state in the southern Bible Belt. It stretches almost one thousand miles from north to south and the same distance from east to west. Of all fifty states, only Alaska has more land. In the early nineteenth century, when the land belonged to Mexico, white settlers came down from the United States, establishing enormous ranches in the eastern cotton lands and farming them with slaves. By 1900, while the northern states industrialized and Manhattan potentates danced their way through the Gilded Age, East Texas was still the land of cotton, worked now by white sharecroppers and the descendants of slaves. West Texas was the land of the open plains, where cowboys drove enormous herds across endless grasslands. Their independence became the stuff of legend, but even as they rode, the state remained mired in poverty.
For a handful of Texas oilmen, that changed at the height of the Great Depression. The state’s first gushers were drilled at the turn of the century, but it wasn’t until the early 1930s that a group of wildcatters began rounding up leases to land in East Texas that the major firms had ignored. When they hit oil over and over again, men like H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchison set off a rush to the Texas oilfields that has never stopped. They also established themselves as powerful backers of right-wing politicians and, in Hunt’s case, fundamentalist Christian preachers. Over the next thirty years, oilmen who made their fortunes in the 1930s bankrolled right-wing think tanks, Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts, the John Birch Society, and a number of explicitly racist and anti-Semitic groups. By 1962, The Nation was reporting that “virtually every Radical Right movement of the postwar era has been propped up by Texas oil millionaires.”
As journalist Bryan Burrough points out in The Big Rich, his compendious chronicle of the state’s leading oil families, the wildcatters of the 1930s hated the taxman, the union organizer, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. They feared that big government and communists might take away their fortunes. At the same time, their fortunes depended on their ability to control the state. To drill for oil, you had to have the rights to the land; to get them, you had to get help from your friends in government. The same paradox drives the builders of data centers and electric car factories today. Elon Musk needs the state to help him wrangle building permits, electricity and favorable tax terms. He also needs the state to regulate his businesses as lightly as possible.
The Christian elements of the Texan Ideology lead to the building of private compounds, not soup kitchens.
The fear of outsiders and of the federal government has haunted Texans since its earliest days. When the land still belonged to Mexico, the Mexican government insisted that Protestant settlers from the north convert to Catholicism. Only after independence did Texans win the right to religious freedom. Since Reconstruction, the government in Washington had been trying to enforce racial equality. Now Franklin Roosevelt seemed to threaten their independence too. Burrough recalls a 1944 visit to the state by writer John Gunther, who found a widespread fear that Roosevelt would overturn the state’s economic and racial orders. As one of Gunther’s interviewees put it, if FDR won again, “it would mean that the Mexicans and niggers will take us over.”
Over time, the oilmen’s antipathy to government coupled with their need to control it led them fund the rise of three presidents—Lyndon B. Johnson, the first George Bush (himself an oilman), and Bush’s son George—as well as any number of other influential politicians, from Johnson advisor and Texas governor John Connally in the 1960s to Texas senator Ted Cruz today. Not all oilmen have been politically conservative, but the great majority have. They’ve also been emphatically Christian. Early on, none outshone H. L. Hunt in his piety. Among other things, in the 1950s, he used his fortune to put former FBI agent Dan Smoot on the radio as the host of a show called Facts Forum. Foreshadowing Rush Limbaugh, Smoot would claim that the New Deal was simply communism and fascism by another name and suggest that all three were sacrilege. “Democracy is a political outgrowth of the teachings of Jesus Christ,” he announced on air. “Christianity is essential to the creation of our democracy. We in Facts Forum know that American democracy is still the most nearly perfect expression ever made by man in legal and political terms of a basic ideal of Christianity.”
The combination of anti-statism, Christian nationalism, and bare-fisted backroom politicking pioneered by the oilmen of the 1930s remains a staple of life at the state capitol today. Since 1995, Republicans have occupied the governor’s mansion and thanks to relentless statewide gerrymandering, they are likely to continue to for some time to come. Today’s third-term occupant, Greg Abbott, has built a policy portfolio that reflects the ideals of contemporary Republicans, but also of long-dead oilmen like H. L. Hunt. He has famously bused migrants from the Mexican border to the sanctuary cities of the north. He has signed a near-total abortion ban, restricted transgender rights, and put an end to DEI offices at public colleges and universities in Texas as well as all state agencies. This fall, thanks to Texas Senate Bill 10, a law he promoted and signed, every public primary and secondary school in Texas has been required to display a sixteen-by-twenty-inch poster of the Ten Commandments that is visible from anywhere in the classroom, without comment. A federal judge has temporarily blocked implementation of the law in eleven of the state’s more than twelve hundred school districts, but outside those districts, the Word of God is on the wall.
Whether the courts will ultimately allow the law to take effect in the remaining eleven districts remains unknown. But the vision underlying Abbott’s legislative agenda reflects a fascinating confluence of ideological streams. Colonial-era fears of a Mexican onslaught meet a New Deal-era dread of economic redistribution. Calls for individual freedom justify the universal imposition of a deeply patriarchal Christianity. The historical power of each of these streams amplifies the seeming legitimacy of the others until they flow together into a vision of a world led by white men, ordained by God with the right to rule over women and people of color and the natural world.
For most of the nineteenth century, this vision animated the plantation culture of the Texas cotton fields. In the twentieth, it helped turn the search for oil into a something close to a divine mission for wildcatters like H. L. Hunt. Today, it fuels a new era of digital extraction. In the networking days of the 1990s, computer manufacturers sought to maximize the processing power of individual machines. The power of the digital network was something of a market externality, the happy byproduct of linking many powerful nodes. Now, however, the rise of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency are driving a new demand for the centralization of computing power and with it, demands for enormous amounts of land and electricity.
Texas is offering both. In January 2025, OpenAI announced the Stargate Project, a $500 billion, four-year effort to build a series of interlinked processing centers around the United States. The first location is under construction now in Abilene, Texas. When it’s complete, it will feature ten buildings of 1.5 million square feet each, filled with racks of electricity-eating servers. For the moment, Stargate is the biggest project on the books. The consortium behind it is planning ten more massive data centers elsewhere in Texas. Each will feature the kind of upfront investment and long-term profit potential once required to drill for oil. And while data centers are being built around the United States, the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area ranks number two in the nation for capacity expansion, behind only Northern Virginia.
Like AI, bitcoin mining requires warehouses of servers and endless steady supplies of electricity to run the computers and the fans that keep them cool. The scale of these operations belies all claims that bitcoin is a “virtual” currency. At Riot Platforms in Rockdale, Texas, the largest bitcoin mining operation in North America, seven buildings, each as nearly as long as three football fields, howl with the sound of the fans cooling thousands of computers as they all try to solve cryptographic puzzles and mint new digital coins. Two hours north, near Corsicana, Riot is building what will be an even larger facility.
Their neighbors are not happy. Apart from the constant noise, bitcoin operations like Riot have increased Texas utility rates by as much as 5 percent, according to a simulation sponsored by the New York Times. What’s worse, the operators of Texas’s public electricity grid currently pay bitcoin miners for saying they will shut down to prevent blackouts at moments of peak demand. In fact, they rarely have to do so, and as a result, have found a way to simply tap public funds for millions of dollars a year.
To the Abbott administration, this is simply the cost of doing business. Although Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has publicly suggested that the state should take a critical look at energy use by AI data centers and bitcoin miners, Abbott has rolled out the red carpet for both. In recent years, the Texas legislature has established a “strategic bitcoin reserve” and offered tax breaks to natural gas producers who turn their gas into energy for bitcoin making. Abbott has said that he hopes such legislation will help make Texas “the epicenter of technological advancement.” The formerly skeptical Patrick has fallen in line too, even taking the opportunity to curry favor from the narcissist in chief: “President Trump has stated unequivocally that he intends to make the United States the cryptocurrency capital of the world. His visionary leadership on bitcoin and digital assets has paved the way for rapid American innovation, and Texas is leading the way.”
A Techno-Theocracy?
But leading the way to where? What is the future Patrick and Abbott want Texas to race toward?
Part of the answer can be found behind the scenes, in the life of Tim Dunn, whom Texas Monthly has called “the state’s most powerful figure.” Dunn leads CrownQuest Operating, one of the state’s largest oil well operators. Dunn is a multibillionaire and a deeply conservative Christian. “I have very deliberately unsegmented my life,” he told a podcaster in 2022. “I don’t have one approach in business and another approach in ministry and another approach in church . . . I work for God, and God has given me a bunch of jobs to do.” Like H. L. Hunt almost a hundred years earlier, Dunn sees drilling for oil—and keeping homosexuals out of schools, income taxes off the books, and renewable energy out of the market—as part of his divine mission.
Dunn’s wealth makes him politically powerful. His allies routinely let Texas legislators know how he wants them to vote on everything from taxes to private schools. If they vote his way, Dunn continues to fund them. If they don’t, he finds and funds an opponent to run against them in the next primary. Yet it’s not just Dunn’s hardball right-wing politics that can show us where Texas and the rest of us might be headed. It’s the way he lives. At night, Dunn goes home to a family compound in the oil capital of Midland, Texas, directly behind Midland Classical Academy, a Christian K–12 school he helped found. As his children have become adults, they’ve built their own houses on the property. Dunn rules it all, father to his family, his Christian school, and, through his donations much of the Abbott administration and the Texas legislature. His life is an emblem of the promise Abbott has been making to men like Elon Musk and Joe Lonsdale: here in Texas you can find the God-given resources you need to get rich and enjoy the divine right to keep your money and your family safe, under your watchful patriarchal eye.
In the 1990s of the Californian Ideology, a loose hippie spiritualism prevailed, but going to church was for the hopelessly square. Today, as Silicon Valley leaders turn to the right, and particularly when they migrate to Texas, many are embracing the simultaneous celebration of entrepreneurship and Christian discipleship at the heart of the Texan Ideology. Elon Musk has announced that although he doesn’t go to church, he considers that the “teachings of Jesus Christ are good and wise” and thinks of himself as a “cultural Christian.” Joe Lonsdale is Jewish, but he regularly promotes “Judeo-Christian” values as fundamental to the good society. When he moved to Texas, he brought with him the Cicero Institute, a free market and public policy think tank he founded in California. Once there, he helped establish the University of Austin, a school devoted to teaching the great books of the Western canon. For Lonsdale, as for Dunn and, increasingly, Musk, the high-tech future will have to be built in a way that blends church, state and market, to the benefit of those most able to seize public resources and turn them to private profit.
That fusion is the essence of the Texan Ideology. The millenarian impulse that animates it could be felt in 1990s California too, but the Californian Ideology grew from the counterculture, a movement driven by the search for a new consciousness, for new ways to understand our collective interconnection and so leave earthly politics behind. Its spiritual tendencies proved ideal for motivating and legitimating the construction of a global digital network. The Texan Ideology grows out of two centuries of resource extraction in the heart of the Bible Belt. Its Christianity emphasizes the idea that saints walk among us and should be venerated over the notion that we should tend to the least among us first and foremost. The Christian elements of the Texan Ideology lead to the building of private compounds, not soup kitchens.
Then again, maybe the Texan Ideology has more in common with its Californian forebear than we think. After all, it was precisely the failure of the digital industries to build an egalitarian society that led to homelessness on San Francisco’s streets. And it may be that in due course, the economic inequalities that have long plagued Texas will drown out the self-serving voices of the high-tech entrepreneurs. If the schools become bad enough, the housing expensive enough, and the Christian nationalist ethos constraining enough, Texans might finally find a way to undo Republicans’ gerrymandering and kick the current regime out of office.
In the meantime, the Texan Ideology is making its way back to California. In February 2025, the Stanford Review, a conservative student publication cofounded by Lonsdale’s former mentor Peter Thiel when he was an undergraduate, published an essay titled “Manifest Destiny is the Antidote to Bureaucracy.” The essay reached deep into the heart of Texas history to justify its calls for massive deregulation of industry, the liberation of entrepreneurial innovation, and the conquest of Greenland and Mars. “Without the frontier, elites would have monopolized land, blocking progress—just like in Europe,” said the authors. “In the oil boom, Texas’ loose regulations let wildcatters drill freely, giving rise to Exxon, Shell and Texaco. More recently, SpaceX was capable of innovating in hard tech when everything from airplanes to automobiles stagnated precisely because space remained a wholly unregulated frontier.”
In the authors’ view, as in that of multiple generations of technology entrepreneurs, the state has to set the regulatory stage for exploration and then get out of the way. The measure of America’s success will not be equality among its people. On the contrary. Only when the right men are allowed to roam the plains will oil be found. And only when oil is found will God’s mission for America finally be fulfilled.